| Contents |
Philosophy and non-philosophy of potato salad / F. Scott Scribner -- Laugh of the revolutionary: Diane di Prima, French feminist philosophy and the contemporary cult of the Beat heroine / Roseanne Giannini Quinn -- Beat U-topos, or, taking Utopia on the road: the case of Jack Kerouac / Christopher Adamo -- Being-at-home: Gary Snyder and the poetics of place / Josh Michael Hayes -- From self-alienation to posthumanism: the transformation of the Burroughsian subject / Michael Sean Bolton -- "I am not an I": performative self(identity) in the poetry of Bob Kaufman / Tom Pynn -- Tongues untied: Beat ethnicities, Beat multiculture / A. Robert Lee -- Joanne Kyger "Descartes and the splendor of": bridging dualisms through collaboration and experimentation / Jane Falk -- John Clellon Holmes and existentialism / Ann Charters -- Wholly communion: poetry, philosophy, and spontaneous bop cinema / David Sterritt -- High off the page: representing the drug experience in the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg / Erik Mortenson -- Genius all the time: the Beats, spontaneous presence, and primordial ground / Marc Olmsted -- |
| Summary |
Originating from underworld slang-the domain of hustlers, drug addicts, and petty thieves-the term "Beat" was short for "beaten down" or downtrodden. To writer Jack Kerouac it symbolized being at the bottom of society's hierarchy and looking up. Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York City at that time. The Beat Generation consisted of writers, artists, and activists, and they became a uniquely American cultural phenomenon with a worldwide influence that introduced new ways of looking at visual art, music, literature, politics, race and gender issues, religion, and philosophy. The original Beat Generation writers include the familiar names of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. Other figures who associated with the movement are Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Bob Kaufman, Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey, Philip Whalen, Diane DiPrima, and John Clellon Holmes, to name a few. The Beats were deeply invested in a philosophy of life that they drew upon to create literary works and bohemian lifestyles. Theirs was a constant search for meaning, a coping with anxiety, alienation, revolutionary protest, and the struggle to find one's place in the world. |
